Chinese whispers

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A new book lifts the lid on the secretive existence of those who
came to Australia in the first gold rush, writes Damien Murphy.

Above the Turon River in the Great Dividing Range, a lonely Chinese grave looks down on long abandoned gold diggings. Locals in the Sofala pub will tell you the old market gardener used to wash and clean the bones of fellow diggers who had died, fill them with gold and send them back. When his time came, there was nobody to send him home.

Historian Janis Wilton says the Sofala grave is apocryphal yet apocalyptic, illustrative of both the racism that beset early Chinese sojourners and the loneliness of living in an adopted culture that never really recognised them as Australian sons. "On one hand the Chinese were seen as a menacing threat, on the other, they were an exotic presence, often forced to live a secret existence, the silence of which continues to reverberate down the generations to their present-day descendants," she says.

"But these people today have the stories of those men and women who came to Australia for the first gold and tin rushes. They were handed down by word-of-mouth, sometimes even in the silences, and the telling of them can be quite cathartic for Chinese Australian families and remind the rest of us of the contribution they made to our society.

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"They were confined to the edge of towns, down by the river ... that's where they grew their vegetables, on the river flats. Yet they were still part of the community, but not really. It's that ambivalence that carried through well into the 20th century."

Wilton, a senior lecturer in Australian history at the University of New England, has just completed Golden Threads: The Chinese in Regional New South Wales 1850-1950, the first attempt to winkle the story of Australia's first post-colonial Asian immigration from remnant families rather than relying on dry bureaucratic documents and contemporary reports with their predilection for racist rhetoric.

She had been preparing to write about the Chinese since completing a BA at the University of Sydney in European history in 1974. Back then, the writing of Australian history was very much a document-based business, almost entirely dependent on colonial authorities and a few first-hand accounts that had somehow survived down the generations. Hardly anybody had heard of oral history. Indeed, many historians dismissed it. Chicago radio broadcaster Studs Terkel had pioneered the technique on a series of programs that came to be known as Conversations with America. The radio show, and his two seminal works, Hard Times (1970) and Working (1974), were so successful that they legitimised oral history as a historian's tool. It came to Australia with Wendy Lowenstein's book Weevils in the Flour: An Oral Record of the 1930s Depression in Australia in 1978.

Four years earlier, new graduate Wilton had begun work as a researcher for the Ethnic Affairs Commission. Amid the flush of Whitlamism, tentative steps were being attempted towards Australia being something more than a monocultural society that owed everything to the Union Jack. The Ethnic Affairs Commission had decided to tell rural students about the histories of their communities and Wilton was employed to work on a project, Immigrants in the Bush.

It took her to the New England area and she spoke with a Greek family here, a German couple there, descendants of Lebanese hawkers ...

"They just told their stories, about coping with only cheddar and tasty cheese ... ordinary things and I taped it all," Wilton recalls.

She also noticed Chinese stores still scattered around the New England towns that had been founded by the men who came with the rushes and stayed on. The history of the stores became Wilton's PhD thesis. One store, Wing Hing Long's at Tingha, was one of a number to open in the 1870s and remained in business until 1998.

And when the Ministry for the Arts conceived the Golden Threads project in 1997, with the aim of working with local museums, historical societies and community members across the state to identify stories, sites, objects, collections and places revealing the rich and varied contribution made to the history of regional NSW by Chinese-Australians, Wilton had found her vocation.

The book traces the experiences of Chinese sojourners and their descendants through their work (diggers, market gardeners, shopkeepers), language, leisure (bachelor society, gambling and opium) food, beliefs and the decision to leave or stay after the gold ran out or the business they had been brought out to serve closed down.

When looked at collectively, their stories began to shed light on family legends and the silences imposed on men and women who were forced to live outside the mainstream because of the colour of their skin.

"The Chinese who came to Australia, especially in the 19th century, did not intend to stay, but they did, some sending money home, others putting down roots," she says.

"For many years, the families would go back to their villages in China to show their children their heritage, sometimes to show off their European wealth, but that all ended when China closed its doors in the late 1940s and these people were cut off from their ancestors' homeland for 30 years."

Golden Threads: The Chinese in Regional New South Wales 1850-1950, by Janis Wilton New England Regional Art Museum in association with Powerhouse Publishing, $34.95, will be published next month.